Month: July 2016

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More Menebroker

paths tw

Paths painting by Nolan Winkler

“We have never grown up from magic—just away.” Ann Menebroker

I recently wrote a piece about my friend Ann Menebroker, the fine poet who died recently at the age of eighty. In response, I received a number of communiqués from people who wanted to read more snippets from Annie’s letters, so I present them here with one of Annie’s poems.

March 2009: I loved the artwork of your friend Marco Donner. In this one, the young Madonna is separated from her child, who is way above her. She looks enraptured and the child looks like a girl…so perhaps that’s what it is…an elevated perception of adult/child, of the specialness of birth, of new beginnings, of innocence. Of the female influence, which is supposedly less wild and warlike than the male. And I could be crazy.

July 2007: I have been writing a little and think I have amassed some eleven or so new poems. Of course they must sit around and I must go back to them after the glow of genius has faded. Ha!

July 2006: If we get to come back once we finish a round on earth, I want to come back flooded with the joy of music, voice, instruments, all of it! Soaked up like gas on a rag, blazing like a Bic lighter starting up the fire. I want to learn harmony and notes and how to put those notes and that harmony together. All of it, baby!

My only two “lovers through the mail” boyfriends are a crazy drunk writer/musician/broke/ill health guy in New Mexico, and a crazy artist/poet trying to quit smoking pot friend in Australia. Their letters, the flirting, all of it, I love! Being with them would be a disaster.

February 2004: I am very bad about rewriting. I am one of the sloppier poets, one who accepts the gift too easily, rips into it, pops out the gift, throws the tissue and ribbons aside! What I edit, I edit as I’m writing in that powerful flow of creativity. I need to work on my editing skills, not to be so easily content. I have had a poem I thought “hot stuff” get cool comments from fine critics to remind me of this!

I treat poems like lovers, caught up in the passion. I know passion cools.

June 2002: I went to Nevada City and spent the night with my daughter Sue and her husband Kevin. We went to a barbecue of a young poet up there. It turned out there were a lot of males and only 3 women, Sue, myself, and another gal well into her fifties. So we got flirted with, which was most fun! A young man kissed me with barbecue sauce on his lips, and an older man hugged and kissed me. Then I left and went safely with Sue and Kevin to their home. I felt like a kid! I’ve been telling all of my women friends about being kissed. God, I’m silly.

It seems lately that I need a little male attention, which hasn’t been the case in a lot of years. So I have to watch it and stay away from them (in any romantic sense, that is.)

No sense messing up a perfectly satisfying life!

January 2004: I’m getting another book out. But don’t worry, no need to buy it. I’ll send you a copy. You’ve seen most of the poems. Many of them are in my previous collections of poetry. They are all from The Wormwood Review. The publisher, up in Grass Valley, came upon them, some 57 or so, and asked me if he could put them in a collection. I said, hmmm, ok. He sent me the book to proof. I just got it. I hadn’t seen some of those poems in years! They are full of my life, my history. They have that “tough gal” feel to some of them. It will be titled Tiny Bites, the Wormwood Poems of Ann Menebroker.

March 2006: And here I am, loving it downtown. The other night I was awakened by all of this noise, as if the two men upstairs (landlord and his partner) were either having very violent sex or were murdering each other. It went on and I got up and looked out the windows, but saw nothing. The next morning my landlord told me that some drunk had tried to kick down the wooden gate at my end, and there was a huge disturbance, police were called, so I was way off!

Stealing Lorca

A fat-paged book in sepia cover

with a young Garcia smiling from

the flat memory of who he was, is

left on the front seat of the old Mercury

Cougar that belonged to her mother

who was more porcupine than cat.

She still pulls quills from her child’s heart plant.

Who did Lorca love? His mother sent

an omelet to the prison where his

rhetoric and fame, his love of handsome

men, brought him. Did he eat this

meal his frightened mother sent?

He smoked loaned cigarettes and cried

the cry of fear and death.

Her mother died at home in her own bed.

Lorca died near a group of olive trees

in the hot season, dramatic bullets

for his final act. Sex is forgotten.

I am really going to die.

Someone stole the book when she

went into the store for a tub of margarine.

This Is Your life. Candid Camera.

I’ve Got A Secret. Survival.

A goddamned book! It wasn’t even hers.

A man’s whole life stolen twice.

Ann Menebroker December 2002

 

More of Ann Menebroker’s poems can be found on the worldwide web.

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Ann Menebroker

flora tw

Flora painting by Nolan WInkler

“the two figures, male and female, are naked and gracefully huge. their raised right feet begin a dance that never continues.” Ann Menebroker

I moved to Sacramento in 1980. I was thirty-one and experiencing a bit of success with my writing. I bought a piano and an old house in a quiet neighborhood and thus began my fifteen-year residency in that river town. I still own the piano and play her every day.

Immediately upon settling in Sacramento, I got involved in the vibrant poetry scene, though I was not a poet, and my first new friends there were poets, one of them Ann Menebroker. Known as Annie to her many pals, I met her when she was forty-four, a beautiful charming woman, shy and brave, funny and deeply serious—a humble and brilliant maker of poems. She died a week ago at the age of eighty. I got the news from our mutual friend Martha Ann, and I have been crying off and on since.

Annie was never anointed by academia, but she published over twenty books of poetry and her poems appeared in dozens of poetry magazines all over America. She was revered by hundreds of poets and is, to my mind, one of our greatest unknowns—unknown in the sense of never being ballyhooed by the grand poohbas of the American literary scene. Her poems were consistently good and often great. She was highly self-critical, but knew she had a gift and continued writing poems until the end of her life.

Annie was poor and for many years lived in a tiny house on an alley. She cleaned houses, worked in art galleries, and for a decade or so was averse to reading in public, a phobia she eventually got over, thank goodness. We began to correspond via the post office while I still lived in Sacramento, though we lived but a few miles apart—we enjoyed keeping up with each other in that old-fashioned way.

One of my favorite memories of Annie was a poetry reading she gave at Luna’s, a Sacramento eatery. Somebody on the bill with Annie brought along an electric piano, and when it was Annie’s turn to read she asked me to accompany her. I stood behind her playing ever so sparingly to not interfere with her marvelous words, and she seemed to subtly sing her lines to the quiet music, her voice deep and warm.

When I moved from Sacramento to Berkeley in 1995, our correspondence accelerated and today I possess a big box full of letters from Annie along with many of her published works. Most amazing to me was that she had this same scale of correspondence with dozens of other people, mostly poets. She made the news of her daily life, no matter how mundane, into delightful impromptu poetry.

In 1991 Annie wrote, “I have never thought anyone would truly be interested in who I was, as I figure I’m just another female bloke who has gone through life, ass-end first, often, in my struggles to grow wiser.

“I was child-like in the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s. I may be growing up in the 90s. I drank and partied with poets by night, and tried to maintain this image of the better parent by day. I probably mixed both worlds to my disadvantage, often. The odd thing is, Todd, as wild as I considered myself, my kids have this image of the very good, caring mother. I hope that’s true. But I was pretty weak and confused.”

In 2003 she typed, “I do not like writing longhand. I used the typewriter as a teenager to write letters, and that—my dear—was so many years ago!

“My thoughts somehow run, where my body sits and lies! I feel I am someone else when I am working on a keyboard. That I exist in a more favorable disguise as a person of knowledge and wit and strength.

“Take away my keys and you take away my engine of existence! I am nothing!”

In 2004 she wrote, “A man on the street moved me, and also nearly intimidated me. I gave him $5. I had $11 in my wallet. I’d come to the grocery store and paid for my groceries with a check. He had spoken to me on my way in, and I liked something in his being, his voice. He practically demanded me to give him $5, but not in an intruding way. So I did. And he got all strange. He wanted to talk and talk and talk to this older woman who was suddenly talking to him and giving him $5. He wanted to write something to me, but couldn’t find any paper. He wanted to hug me and/or kiss me. I kept smiling and saying No, no, it’s fine. Please, may your day go well. We talked in the spirit of the street and he insisted on grabbing my cart and walking with me to my car to put my groceries in the trunk. I thought he would never leave and I wasn’t afraid, but people were staring at us and I was afraid they would insult him by asking me if I was being ‘bothered.’

“He said a few times, ‘Who are you?’ He said something else and told me never to forget, and I came home and was writing a letter to a woman poet down south, and told her [the thing I was never to forget] and she said, Annie, that’s a small poem. So I put it on top of a poem about winter I was working on but I’m not sure if the longer poem is any good, or that what I put on it makes sense. It was something silly, about the survival of a goose, what he said. I got it all mixed up. Does it matter? No.”

Several of Annie’s fine and inimitable poems can be found on the worldwide web.

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Kevin & Mumia

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Moments That We Shape painting by Nolan Winkler 

“On a hot day in the southern desert of Africa I wanted to speak to one of my favorite Bushmen. He was sitting in the middle of a thorn bush, huddled in an attitude of the most intense concentration…but his friends would not let me get near him, saying, ‘But don’t you know, he is doing work of the utmost importance. He is making clouds.’” Laurens Van Der Post

Yesterday, the basketball player Kevin Durant signed a two-year contract with the Golden State Warriors for 55 million dollars and I read Chris Hedges’ interview with Mumia Abu Jamal, who has now served thirty-five years of a life sentence for a murder he may or may not have committed.

During the interview, Mumia, who is quite ill and not receiving adequate health care, said many troubling things. “The black political elites, including Barack Obama, are powerless. They are emblems. They are not the voice of black America. They are like a ventriloquist’s dummy. They mouth the same words the white corporate masters mouth. They do not name unpleasant truths. They never lifted their voices to denounce Bill Clinton’s decision to massively expand our system of mass incarceration. And they do not lift their voices now. They go right along with the repression. And they are well paid for it.”

He went on to say: “Black people will probably vote for Clinton, but this symbolizes the emptiness of hope. They fear Trump. They should look closely at the pictures from Trump’s third wedding. Hillary Clinton is in the front pew of the church. Hillary, Bill, Trump, and Melania are shown embracing at Trump’s estate during the reception. These people are part of the same elite circle. They represent the same financial interests. They work for the same empire. They have grown rich from the system. The words they shout back and forth during political campaigns are meaningless. Trump or Clinton will deliver the same political result. They will serve, like Obama, corporate and military power.”

“Everything that happens is at once natural and inconceivable.” E.E. Cioran

Kevin Durant is twenty-seven, seven-feet-tall, and one of best and most popular basketball players in the world. He was born in Washington D.C. where he and his sister and two brothers were raised by their mother and grandmother after their father abandoned the family. Kevin played one year of college basketball and then was drafted by the Seattle Supersonics the year before the team moved to Oklahoma City and became the Thunder. He was named rookie of the year and then played eight years for the Thunder before deciding to sign with the Warriors.

Kevin made 17 million dollars a year playing for the Thunder, but that was a small fraction of his annual income. He has lucrative endorsement deals with Nike, Sprint, Gatorade, Panini, General Electric, and 2K Sports. His agent is the media mogul Jay-Z. Kevin pledged a million dollars to the American Red Cross for the victims of the 2013 tornado disaster in Oklahoma. In 2014, he partnered with Kind Snacks and launched StrongAndKind.com to show “being kind is not a sign of weakness.” He is also a spokesperson for the Washington D.C. branch of P’Tones Records, a nationwide non-profit after-school music program.

With Kevin joining Steph, Klay, Draymond, and Andre on the Warriors, barring injuries, they should be the best team in the game.

I wonder what Kevin Durant thinks of Mumia Abu Jamal. Kevin describes himself as a high school kid who enjoys playing video games in his spare time. A devout Christian, Kevin goes to chapel before every game and has religious tattoos on his stomach, wrist, and back. He is, apparently, apolitical.

 “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself, but rather nature exposed to our methods of questioning.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Mumia told Chris Hedges, “The liberals and the Democrats are in many ways more dangerous than the right wing. Repression and neoliberalism are more effectively instituted by Democrats such as Bill and Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. They sound reasonable. But because what they do is hidden, it is more insidious and often more deadly.”

Kevin Durant met Obama on the White House basketball court and they shared a bro hug. Durant said of the meeting, “It was a good feeling to meet the president. Of course I always wanted to do that. Me being from D.C., it was pretty cool to see him. I was excited to get that opportunity. It’s something I’m always going to remember.”

Mumia has never met Obama, but in 2014 Obama nominated Debo P. Adegbile to head the civil rights division of the Justice Department. Debo, a former lawyer for the NAACP who worked on Abu-Jamal’s case, was rejected for the Justice Department job by the U.S. Senate because of his public support of Mumia.

Twenty years ago, when Mumia’s execution was drawing near, I joined thousands of other people on marches in San Francisco demanding Mumia be given a new trial. He never got a new trial, but his death sentence was eventually commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Whether he is guilty of murder or not, there is no doubt he deserves a new trial. Sadly, he will probably never get one. He is the victim of our deeply racist social and justice systems, along with millions of other men and women trapped in poverty, and now that he is no longer in danger of being executed—except through the slow death of incarceration—he is rarely mentioned in the mainstream news.

I used to be an avid basketball fan. Two of my published novels feature basketball subplots involving fictional versions of The Golden State Warriors. In a sense, I owe my success as a writer to my interest in basketball, though nowadays I hardly follow professional basketball, for today’s game little resembles the beautiful sport I fell in love with as a young man.

I wonder if Mumia watches basketball on his tablet in his cell.

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Brexit Musings

you just looked up at the stars site

You Just Looked Up At the Stars painting by Nolan Winkler

“Greece should go back to a national currency to have more autonomous decision-making with regards to it own economy, which it needs if it wants to pave a more sustainable path.” Jennifer Hinton, co-author of How on Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World by 2050

When I heard that a majority of British voters wanted to leave the European Union, my first thought was, “Well, I would want to leave, too, after what that union did and is continuing to do to the people of Greece and Spain in order to funnel more billions into the coffers of the corporate overlords via their putrid toxic derivative hedge funds.”

A friend and I were discussing Brexit and she said she had spoken to a British couple residing in Mendocino and was told that many people in England voted to get out of the union because EU laws allow member nations to plunder the dwindling fisheries of England, and the British people were fed up with that. Didn’t read that anywhere in the mainstream news.

The results of the election showed that sixty per cent of London voters wanted to remain in the EU, while the majority of people outside that largest of corporate-controlled city-states wanted out. What does this tell us? One sector of British society is flourishing at the expense of the rest of the society. Sound familiar?

I’ve read dozens of articles about what a disaster Britain’s exit portends, but so far the only disaster to have manifested is that stock markets, otherwise known as Ponzi schemes for rich people, went down for a day or two all over the world because the rigged game was temporarily upset by this unexpected rebellion of working people tired of seeing the quality of their lives deteriorate.

Meanwhile, Hillary, the darling of the corporate overlords, is preparing to push through any and all trade agreements favoring corporations over the states composing the United States of America, and this one aspect of her criminality not only portends disaster for anyone not among the super wealthy, but is an echo of what the European Union does, which is give corporations disguised as the EU governing body the power to supersede the will of the peoples of supposedly sovereign nations.

Had not Greece given up their national currency when they joined the EU, they could have Grexited long ago, and the Greek people, save for a tiny elite class, would be a thousand times better off than they are today. The media does not report that Greece has been ransacked to serve a few obscenely wealthy hedge fund crooks, something that could never have happened if Greece had been equipped to leave the EU, which I think they will do eventually.

Our media’s coverage of Brexit reminds me of our media’s coverage of Bernie Sanders, Single Payer Healthcare, the accelerating poisoning of the biosphere resulting from the constant increase of greenhouse gases, and everything else we desperately need to be informed about but aren’t unless we have the chutzpah to go looking for the truth. Thus when I hear people parroting the media consensus that Brexit is terrible and nothing good will come of it, I think about the media consensus on Single Payer Healthcare versus what the vast majority of people want and need, and then I’m not so sure Great Britain choosing to leave the EU is a bad thing.

Certainly on paper the idea of a unified egalitarian Europe is a good idea, but the idea has never matched reality. The European Union, NAFTA, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the soon-to-be ratified Trans-Pacific Partnership were all designed by and for multinational corporations to facilitate the takeover over of more and more of the global economy, and specifically to disempower working people, labor unions, and most people on earth.

Oh, but Scotland wants to stay in the EU. How come? Scotland has never wanted to be part of Great Britain. The history of England going back a thousand years is rife with wars between Scotland and England. This is yet another opportunity for Scotland to break free of the yoke of their imagined oppressors.

The mainstream media also continues to report that many of the people who voted for Great Britain to leave the EU didn’t know what they were voting for and now would like to change their minds. I wonder how the media found that out. Or maybe they just knew those people were flummoxed and pixilated because otherwise how can we explain why so many people would vote to leave such a wonderful organization?

I heard two young British socialists, one for leaving the EU, one for remaining, debating the decision to leave, and the one who wanted to remain in the EU said, “We should have stayed and reformed the EU, worked within the system to make it better.” And the one for leaving said something to the effect of, “Poppycock.”

Imagine trying to reform American politics or the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. Imagine Hillary running a campaign without money from major corporations. Without hedge fund Wall Street crookster money she would be Hillary who? Imagine Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination in a country where the trillions spent on war every year were instead spent on the health and education and economic security of the American citizenry. Imagine a media that actually reported the truth so the citizenry could make reasonable choices about who and what they voted for.

In the big global picture, the possible breakup of the European Union is part of the breakdown of human systems all over the world in the face of overpopulation, resource scarcity, climate change, and the limitations of our collective capacity to live within our means. Technology has enabled the banksters to engineer a system that would eventually lead to a few people on earth owning everything, if only the eight billion other humans would just keep quiet and allow that to happen. But darn it, they won’t keep quiet.